


Ad Ultimum

by epsiloneridani



Category: Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms, Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen, contemplative angst, rvb angst war entry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 15:19:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15665874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epsiloneridani/pseuds/epsiloneridani
Summary: Not so long ago she stood on the screaming scarlet battlefield, her heart an inferno, her soul aflame: to the last. Not so long ago, she was a warrior and he stood at her side. Not so long ago, he lied. Not so long ago, he died.Felix is gone. Kimball doesn’t know what to think.





	Ad Ultimum

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: canon-typical language and violence

Not so long ago, they called her general.

They call her  _President_  now and Vanessa pastes on a smile and slides into her robes and stares in the mirror and knows: she was never meant for this role. Doyle was the diplomat, an eloquent orator who could turn a crowd as easily as a phrase. She’s always been ire and brimstone and raging red wrath, ready to rise, ready to die.

Not so long ago, they called her fire.

They called  _him_  Felix, though one waste-worn day wracked by too much loss he cracked a crooked grin and said  _It’s Isaac._  She’d smiled back politely and swiped at the blood on her brow and rolled her eyes at this mercenary made revolutionary. He said he was in it for the money, that he loved the madness, that one day, years down the road, he’d settle, and she’d nodded along over their battle plans and known, as she’d known from the moment they met, that he was too restless to do anything but die in this life.

She spends her days in an office and not a barracks, wandering the lonely corridors long after her staff has gone home. The capitol’s been rebuilt since Doyle’s sacrifice and she stops in those cold marble halls and stares up at the monument that stands silent in the embassy’s open courtyard. Marble is for leaders, marble is how the ancients esteemed their fallen, and it had seemed so appropriate for Doyle who had been so brave in the end.

Not so long ago, she called him coward.

“The Spartans buried their dead on the battlefield. It was the Greeks that believed in monuments.” The voice catches her by surprise, a quiet offering in the still, still night. The shadow moves up beside her and she straightens her shoulders and sharpens her gaze. The UNSC insisted on sending her a military advisor to broker weapons restrictions and trade agreements and she’d fought them tooth and nail until she sat staring out at the stars and the ships high beyond and Doyle’s words rang so loudly in her ears.  _We have to compromise if we ever want to achieve true peace._

Not so long ago, she called it inconceivable.

“Yes,” she agrees, glancing at him from the corner of her eye. He carries himself like military but there’s nothing in his file to indicate he ever was. She’s had enough false pretenses for seven lifetimes. “But he was more of a diplomat than a soldier. He deserved better than a headstone.”

He nods. In the gloom, his smile is a ghost. “Most do.”

She sees that empty look every morning in the mirror. Vanessa folds her hands in front of her so she can’t cross them, can’t broadcast her caution. “What are you doing here so late?” she asks at last. “It’s past midnight.”

He’s turning something over and over between his thumb and forefinger, a chattering chain. Dogtags. “It’s the anniversary,” he says at last and it takes her a moment to sift through the hundreds of battles the UNSC’s had before it hits her. Reach. Chorus has been alone for so long, so far, but news of a massacre on that scale made its way to even the furthest parts of the Rim.

“Did you lose someone there?”

He snorts. “War takes a lot of good people.”

She thinks of Doyle, thinks of her mother and her father and everyone she’s ever seen serve and fight and fall and die. Chorus was a cauldron for twenty-eight years before Locus and Felix showed up to finish the job. She’s known war and nothing less and now the war is done, the war is gone, and here she stands in the hell-wracked heart of her city. Hope and healing are more arduous undertakings than even the most desperate defense.

Not so long ago, she called for fury.

“There isn’t enough space for monuments to the dead,” she says. “Chorus was fighting for just as long as the UNSC and the Covenant. We were almost the agents of our own extinction.”

“What about the mercenaries?”

Catalysts, maybe. Octane, certainly. Her chest twists. “What about them?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t they have a hand in your civil war?”

“We weren’t dying fast enough for Charon.” It tastes bitter on her tongue but it comes out so smooth and untouched. “They hired Locus and Felix to finish us.”

“He betrayed you.”

She doesn’t have to ask which one he means. “That’s war,” she says, one of Felix’s sayings that almost makes her flinch when it slips unbidden from her lips. Maybe he believed it. Maybe he didn’t. She never really knew him, after all.

He’s quiet for a beat. “What do you do now?”

What now? What else? “We carry on,” she says firmly, and if she closes her eyes maybe she can still feel Isaac’s hand wound into hers, a haven for her heaving red heart. He knew what to say to bring her back from the edge, he knew what to say to calm her head, and she thinks of his blade between Tucker’s ribs, thinks of his sword at Wash’s throat, and her chest churns.  _You have to be their hope. There’s no one else left._

Not so long ago, she called him compatriot.

“Thermopylae,” her companion says suddenly, staring off past the monument into the inky abyss. She tilts her head and he snorts softly, quiet, contemplative, maybe grieved. “The Three Hundred at Thermopylae were given a headstone.”

“For fighting to the last.” With your shield or on it. How many times has she charged into the fire with those words burning at her lips? There was honor in fighting oppressors, she said, there was justice in slaying tyrants  _he_  said, and then – and then. Isaac stood by her for two eternal years, always her confidante, always her ally. For revenge, he told her, and took a bullet meant for her own heart. For money, he claimed, and butchered a hit squad commissioned to kill her. Vanessa draws a hand into a fist. So much death. So many lies.

Not so long ago, he stood at her side.

“There’s less glory in a final stand than people think.”

Doyle’s statue is a shadow above, a looming guardian. He never asked to be a warrior. He never wanted to be a hero. “They’re only good for monuments,” she says, and the truth burns in her chest. Smiles and robes: this role is not her own. When they became allies against their common adversaries she’d always assumed Doyle would take the mantle after all was said and done and Locus and Felix were gone. “It’s easy to die for what you believe. It’s a hell of a lot harder to live for it.”

“What do you believe in, President Kimball?”

Vanessa quirks an eyebrow. There’s no malice, only measured intensity. “That’s a loaded question.”

He lifts his hands helplessly.

“Chorus,” she says, because of course Chorus, of course its people, of course every single person she fought to save. Isaac called her hope. Isaac is dead and gone. When did she begin to call him Isaac?

“Chorus was at war for thirty years. You were born into it. What did that make you?”

“What I became was my choice,” she shoots back sharply. “War is a circumstance, not a sentence.”

“You were a soldier from the day you were born.”  
           “Yes,” she allows. “We all were. But we chose – we’re  _choosing_  – to make ourselves something more.”

“Not everyone would.”

Not everyone did. Isaac stood against them to the last, defiant, abandoned. She went back through the comm. chatter later to hear that final, fatal message. Sometimes she wishes she hadn’t. So much desperation, so much despair: he hovered on the brink of darkness and dared. She wonders, in her quieter moments, what path he took that could send him so deeply astray. She wonders – and she shoves it away.

“I fight,” she says, drawing her hand into a fist, clenching, clenching. “Every day, I fight.”

Not so long ago, they called her commander.

He waits, waits. “What are you fighting for?” he asks at last. The dogtags are still in his grip. “Why do any of this?”

Why independence? Why breathe? “Because I look to the future and I see a better tomorrow,” she says quietly. How many times did she say that to Isaac? How many times did he convince her she believed it? “That means making choices based on who I want to be when I wake up in the morning. If I can look myself in the eye, if I can live with what I’ve done, then none of this has been for nothing.”

Her compatriot snorts softly, folds one arm over the other and rocks back on his heels. “I wish I had your faith.”

“Faith is all I have.”

His chuckle is soft, low, lost. “The Spartans lost at Thermopylae, you know.”

“Their sacrifice meant others lived on to fight another day. The Greeks won the war a year later.”

“‘Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.’”

“Ad ultimum,” Vanessa supplies, and he nods. The dogtags chatter in his palm. Doyle is a silent sentinel, scattered to the stars above. Her advisor nods and falls silent. When he slips away, she barely notices. Ad ultimum.

To the last.

Not so long ago, the world was falling down around her and her helmet was shattered and her heart was an inferno of grieving, goring loss. Not so long ago, Isaac clutched her hand and squeezed and snapped  _We fight to the last man. No less, Vanessa. You hear me? I’m with you. No less._  Not so long ago. Not so long ago. An eternity. A divide. Isaac Gates is dead.

Not so long ago, she called him friend.

—–


End file.
